Then I saw a hulking shadow stir, in a parked car on L &L’s side of the street, just a few yards from the storefront.
Unmistakable.
The Kumquat Sasquatch.
The car was an economy model, bright red, and he filled it like it had been cast around his body. I saw him lean sideways to watch the Cadillac with Danny and Welcome inside round the corner of Smith and disappear with a pulse of brakelights. Then he turned his attention back to the storefront; I read the movement in the disappearance of a nose from the silhouette, its replacement by an elephantine ear. The giant was doing what I was doing, staking out L &L.
He watched Tony, and I watched them both. Tony was a lot more interesting at the moment. I hadn’t often seen him reading, and never this intently. He was searching for something in the sheaf of papers he’d pulled from Minna’s drawers, his brow furrowed, cigarette in his lips, looking like Edward R. Murrow’s punk brother. Now, unsatisfied, he dug in another drawer, and worked over a notebook I recognized even from across the street as the one containing my own stakeout jottings from the day before. I tried not to take it personally when he thrust this aside even more hastily and went back to tearing up the drawers.
The large shadow took it all in, complacent. His hand moved from somewhere below the line of the car window and briefly covered his mouth; he chewed, then leaned forward to dribble out some discarded seeds or pits. A bag of cherries or olives this time, something a giant would gobble in a handful. Or Cracker Jack, and he didn’t like peanuts. He watched Tony like an operagoer who knew the libretto, was curious only to gaidew details of how the familiar plot would play out this time.
Tony exhausted the drawers, started in on the file cabinets.
The giant chewed. I blinked in time with his chewing, and counted chews and blinks, occupying my Tourette’s brain with this nearly invisible agitation, tried to stay otherwise still as a lizard on the stoop. He had only to turn this way to spot me. My whole edge consisted of seeing without being seen; I had nothing more on the giant, had never had. If I wanted to preserve that wafer-thin edge I needed to find a better hiding place-and it wouldn’t hurt to get in out of the stiff, cold wind.
The three remaining L &L cars were my best option. But the Pontiac, which I would have preferred, was up ahead of the giant’s car, easily in his line of sight. I was sure I didn’t want to face whatever ghosts or more tangibly olfactory traces of Minna might be trapped inside the sealed windows of the Death Car. Which left the Tracer. I felt in my pocket for my bunch of keys, found the three longest, one of which was the Tracer’s door and ignition. I was preparing to duckwalk down the pavement and slip into the Tracer when the Cadillac reappeared, hurtling down Bergen, with Danny at the wheel.
He parked in the same spot at the front of the block and walked back toward L &L. I slumped on the stoop, played drunk. Danny didn’t see me. He went inside, surprising Tony in his filework. They exchanged a word or two, then Tony slid the drawer closed and bummed another cigarette from Danny. The shadow in the little car went on watching, sublimely confident and peaceful. Neither Tony nor Danny had ever seen the giant, I suppose, so he had less to worry about in attracting attention than I did. But reason alone couldn’t account for the giant’s composure. If he wasn’t a student of Gerard’s, he should have been: He possessed true Buddha-nature, and would have surpassed his teacher. Three hundred and fifty-odd pounds instill a cosmic measure of gravity, I suppose. What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor? was the joke I remembered now, one of Loomis’s measly riddles. Make me one with everything. I would have been happy to be one with everything at that moment.
Heck, make me one with anything.
I was pretty hungry, too, if I thought about it. A stakeout was customarily a gastronomic occasion, and I was beginning to get that itch for something between two slices of bread. Why shouldn’t I be hungry? I’d missed dinner, had Kimmery instead.
With thoughts of food and sex my attention slipped, so that I was startled now to see Tony pop out of the storefront, his expression still as fierce as it had been when he was poring over the paperwork. For a moment I thought I’d been spotted. But he turned toward Smith Street, crossed Bergen, and disappeared around the corner.
The giant watched, unimpressed, unworried.
We waited.
Tony returned with a large plastic shopping bag, probably from Zeod’s. The only thing I could discern was a carton of Marlboros sticking out of the top, but the bag was heavy with something. Tony opened the passenger door of the Pontiac and put the bag on the seat, glanced quickly up the street without spotting either me or the giant, then relocked the car and went back to L &L.
Figuring it was status quo for the time being, I made my way back down Bergen, up Hoyt Street, and around the block the long way, and checked into Zeod’s myself.
Zeod liked to work the late hours, do the overnight, check in the newspaper deliveries at six and then sleep through the bright hours of the morning and early afternoon. He was like the Sheriff of Smith Street, eyes open while we all slept, seeing the drunks stagger home, keeping his eye on the crucial supplies, the Ding Dongs and Entenmann’s cookies, the forty-ounce malt liquor and the cups of coffee “regular” with a picture of the Parthenon on the cup. Except now he had company down the street at L &L, Tony and Danny and the giant and myself enacting our strange vigil, our roundelay of surveillance. I wondered if Zeod knew about Minna yet. As I slipped up to the counter the groggy counter boy was punishing the slicer with a steaming white towel, replenishing the towel in a basin of hot suds, while Zeod stood exhorting him, telling him how he could be doing it better, squeezing some value out of him before he quit like all the others.
“Crazyman!”
“Shhh.” I imagined that Tony or the giant could hear Zeod bellow through the shop window and around the corner of the block.
“You’re working so late for Frank tonight? Something important, eh? Tony just came.”
“Important Freaks! Important Franks!”
“Ho ho ho.”
“Listen, Zeod. Can you tell me what Tony bought?” Zeod screwed up his face, finding this question sensational. “You can’t ask him yourself?”
“No, I can’t.”
He shrugged. “Six-pack of beer, four sandwiches, carton of cigarettes, Coca-Cola-whole picnic.”
“Funny picnic.”
“Wasn’t funny to him,” said Zeod. “Couldn’t make him smile. Like you, Crazyman. On a very serious case, eh?”
“What-becausewhich, besideswhich-what sandwiches did he buy?” It was my suddenly ravenous appetite that steered this inquiry.
“Ah!” Zeod rubbed his hands together. He was always ready to savor his own product on someone else’s behalf. “Turkey with Thousand, very nice on a kaiser roll, pepperoni-and-provolone hero with peppers inside, two roast beef with horseradish on rye bread.”
I had to clutch the counter to keep from falling over, this storm of enticements was so heady.
“You like what you hear, I can see that,” said Zeod.
I nodded, turned my head sideways, took in the fresh-gleaming slicer, the elegant curve of the fender that sheathed the bla.